A Flight of Parsons: The Divinity Diaspora of Trinity College Dublin

By Pickwick Publications

Irish Anglican clergymen played an important role in the creation of a nineteenth-century "Greater Ireland," a term denoting a diasporic movement in which the Irish transformed into a global people, actively participating in British imperial expansion and colonial nation building. These essays address the formative influences and circumstances that informed the mental world and disposition of Irish Anglicans, particularly clergy who were graduates of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), an institution pivotal in the formation of attitudes among the Irish Anglican elite. TCD was the gathering point for Anglicans of different backgrounds, and as such acted as a great leveler and formative center where laity and aspirant clergy were educated together under a common curriculum. In common with the Irish as a whole, TCD graduate clergy exerted an influence on colonial life in the religious, cultural, intellectual, and political spheres out of all proportion to their numbers. Faced with its dismantling in the old world, adherents of the Church of Ireland availed of opportunities for its reconstruction in the new and in the process bequeathed an important legacy in the colonial church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jul 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532609107

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A Flight of Parsons

The Divinity Diaspora of Trinity College Dublin

Edited by Thomas P. Power

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A Flight of Parsons

The Divinity Diaspora of Trinity College Dublin

Copyright © 2018 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0909-1

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0911-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0910-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Power, Thomas P., editor.

Title: A flight of parsons : the divinity diaspora of Trinity College Dublin / edited by Thomas P. Power.

Description: Eugene, OR : Pickwick Publications, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-0909-1 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-0911-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0910-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)—History.

Classification: LF915 .F55 2018 (paperback) | LF915 .F55 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/13/18

Front Cover Illustration

A Flight of Parsons from the Robinson Collection of Caricatures (Digital No. OLS-CARI-ROB0051), Department of Early Printed Books, Trinity College Library is reproduced with the permission of The Board of Trinity College Dublin.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Trinity College, Dublin, and the Making of Irish Evangelicalism, 1790–1850

Chapter 3: The Formation of a Seceder

Chapter 4: An Awful Mystery

Chapter 5: A Question of Possession—Who Owned the Church of Ireland’s History?

Chapter 6: James Henthorn Todd, an Irish High Churchman and Early Tractarian at Trinity College, Dublin

Chapter 7: The Role of Bible Societies in Identity Formation, 1800–1850

Chapter 8: That Ultra-Protestant Nursery

Chapter 9: A Zealous, Well-educated, and Well-informed Body of Clergy

Chapter 10: Samuel Blake’s Projects and Ministries

Chapter 11: Anglican Deaconesses in Canada 1889−1969

Chapter 12: From Trinity College, Dublin, to Terra Australis

Chapter 13: The Word of God Is Seed

Contributors

Alan R. Acheson has a PhD from Queen’s University, Belfast. His publications include A History of the Church of Ireland1691–2002 (2nd ed. 2002), Bishop John Jebb and the Nineteenth Century Anglican Renaissance (2013), and The Shaping of Northern Ireland: A Historical Perspective. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada.

James Blake Knox recently completed his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, entitled Fact or Fiction? The Church of Ireland’s Writing of Irish Church History, 1838–1870.

Michael Gladwin is Lecturer in History at St. Mark’s National Theological Centre in the School of Theology, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Anglican Clergy in Australia, 1788–1850: Building a British World (2015).

Alan L. Hayes is Bishops Frederick and Heber Wilkinson Professor of the History of Christianity at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, and Director of the Toronto School of Theology. He has published broadly in Anglican studies and Canadian church history. He is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada in the diocese of Niagara.

Ann McCormack is a local historian based in Berkshire, England. She is a former nurse and administrator. As a mature student, she undertook a BA in History at the University of Reading and an MA in Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published items on local history and contributes to history tours and lectures in Berkshire. Her interests include Irish migration and church history.

Patricia McKee is a scholar, academic, Anglican priest, and former chaplain. While studying for her BD (Hons), she developed an interest in the outworkings of the Oxford Movement in Ireland. She published her initial findings on the leading Irish Tractarian, James Henthorn Todd, in Search: A Church of Ireland Journal (2006), followed by a longer essay on Todd, his family and antiquarian networks in Romantic Ireland From Tone to Gonne: Fresh Perspectives on Nineteenth Century Ireland, (2013), and then completed her PhD thesis at Trinity College, Dublin: James Henthorn Todd, A Tractarian at Trinity: Making Ireland in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2015). Her current interests include writing historical biography and memoir in literature, history and theology.

Miriam Moffitt lectures in church history in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland. Her publications include Soupers and Jumpers, the Protestant Missions in Connemara, 1848–1937 (2008) and The Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, 1849–1950 (2010). She is a contributor to and co-editor of The Church of Ireland and its Past (2017).

Sean Otto is assistant registrar and adjunct professor of church history, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. His research interests include medieval theology, preaching, and heresy. He is the author of several articles on the theology and sermons of John Wyclif, and is currently completing a monograph on Wyclif’s anti-fraternal preaching.

Thomas P. Power is adjunct professor of church history, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. Most recently he is the author of Ministers and Mines: Religious Conflict in an Irish Mining Community, 1847–1858 (2014), editor of Change and Transformation: Essays in Anglican History (2013), and contributor to and co-editor of Reformation Worlds: Antecedents and Legacies in the Anglican Tradition (2016).

Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. An Anglican priest, he is author, most recently, of Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures (2016) and A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life (2016).

Timothy C. F. Stunt has taught history in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States. His books include From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain 1815–35 (2000) and The Elusive Quest of the Spiritual Malcontent: Some Early Nineteenth-century Ecclesiastical Mavericks (2015). He contributed numerous articles to The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press), including biographies of J. N. Darby, Francis W. Newman and Archbishop Power Trench.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgement is made to the editor of the Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 53.1–2 (2015) 40–66, where the essay by Alan Hayes on Samuel Blake first appeared.

My grateful thanks to Rachel Lott of Wycliffe College for her diligent work formatting the manuscript for submission, her stellar work on the bibliographic apparatus, and for useful suggestions.

Thomas P. Power

Abbreviations

ACC Anglican Church of Canada

AO Archives of Ontario

AWTC Anglican Women’s Training College

CCSS Colonial Church and School Society

CIHM Canadian Institute of Historical Micro-reproductions

CMS Church Missionary Society

DCB Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 15 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–2005.

DEB Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, 1730–1860. 2 vols. Edited by Donald M. Lewis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

DUM Dublin University Magazine. Dublin: Curry, 1833–77.

GSA General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada

HBS Hibernian Bible Society

HCMS Hibernian Church Missionary Society

JCCHS Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society

LPL Lambeth Palace Library

NLI National Library of Ireland

RCBL Representative Church Body Library

SPCK Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge

SPG Society for the Promotion of the Gospel

TCD Trinity College, Dublin

WCA Wycliffe College Archives

1

Introduction

Recent publications have highlighted the contributions of the Irish of different denominations in the creation of a global religious diaspora.¹ As one dimension to this movement, this volume of essays examines the experience of Irish Anglicans in the nineteenth century, particularly clergy who were graduates of Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), and their lay associates, the formative influences on them, and the varied contributions they made and legacies they left in Britain, Canada, and Australia.

Irish Anglican clergymen played an important role in the creation of a nineteenth-century Greater Ireland, which denotes a diasporic movement in which the Irish transformed into a global people, actively participating in British imperial expansion and colonial nation-building. These essays address the formative influences and circumstances that informed the mental world and disposition of Irish Anglicans, particularly their clergy, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and how these emanated in the colonial church and their legacy there.

In the course of the early nineteenth century, movement outward was triggered because of a number of developments that challenged the dominant position of the Established Church in Ireland. Foundational in this respect was the historic minority status of its adherents. In Ireland, although Anglicans constituted the largest Protestant denomination, they were in a minority in relation to the majority Catholic population. Around 1840, the ethnic-religious breakdown of the Irish population was 80 percent Roman Catholic, 12 percent Anglican, and the Ulster-Scots at 8 percent, who were mostly Presbyterian.² Their position as a minority served, on the one hand, to sharpen their sense of self-identity, and on the other, gave them a missionary purpose. While its embattled minority status emanated in an evangelical and missionary upsurge in the 1820s, this was not enough to propel the church into a majority position. Rather there were additional circumstances that further undermined its status in Irish society.

That status was based on the fact that the Church of Ireland, though a minority denomination, was the established, official state church, which gave it a position of authority and influence beyond its numbers. Such influence extended through its parishes which were units of local government, its ecclesiastical courts, its bishops and clergy (some of whom held official positions in the government, local and central), and its churches as places of worship. While a series of reforms since 1800 addressed some of the more serious abuses like non-residence, pluralism, and political interference, and while the number of churches increased by about one-third, and better financial practices were introduced, the church was still in a precarious position for the wider historical context was not auspicious.

All the indicators were that the government of the day was intent on dismantling its privileged position. Increased mobilization by Catholics resulted in significant concessions, notably the act of 1829, which conceded the right of Catholics—if elected—to sit in parliament, which was a major dent to Anglican dominance of the political system. For many Protestants the victory of the Catholic Association under Daniel O’Connell held out the prospect of a radical restructuring of Irish society, one that suggested Catholic hegemony. To exacerbate the situation, in 1831 the introduction by the Whig government of a national system of nondenominational education was seen as an attack on a sector seen by many Anglicans as their prerogative.

Further, the Church Temporalities Act (3 and 4 Will. IV, c.37) of 1833 was a landmark piece of legislation, for it signaled direct government intervention in the institutional structure of the church. The act reduced the number of archbishoprics in Ireland from four to two, the number of bishops by ten, and appointed commissioners with powers to divide livings, suspend appointments, and allocate revenues. Given the administrative downsizing it mandated, the act was wide-ranging in its impact, for since episcopal patronage was the main source of clerical recruitment in Ireland, the act reduced and made more competitive the opportunities for advancement by clergy and caused them to seek out openings elsewhere.³ In fact, the act was the direct cause of many Irish clergy emigrating, most immediately to pursue openings in England.⁴ As Gladwin shows, among the Irish-born clergy who served in Australia, only seven migrated to Australia before the passing of the Church Temporalities Act, while forty-one clergymen (85 percent of all Irish Australian clergymen) migrated during 1833–50.⁵ Already many Irish clergy had gone to Canada prior to the act’s passage and the exodus was to accelerate thereafter.⁶

Added to all this was the collapse of the economic boom generated by the Napoleonic wars. After 1815 depression set in and continued into the 1820s and was exacerbated by a severe cholera outbreak in 1832–33. Further, as the 1830s progressed, recurrent agrarian violence was to coalesce around the unresolved issue of tithe, the main source of clerical income.⁷ The clergy who emigrated in the first few decades of the nineteenth century were the inheritors of a long experience of their class in dealing with tithe. It had become one of contention increasingly in the second half of the eighteenth century and was to continue into the 1830s.⁸ Although the tithe amounts collected in individual cases were not (in the words of one rector) enormous, being on average a net sum of £324.9s.10d. (or even as low as £250), and, although the tax had the sanction of law, it lacked equity as it was not only payable by adherents to the Church of Ireland but was also demanded of Roman Catholics and non-conformists, and resisted by them on the basis that no desired service was provided in return for payment, nor was it sought.⁹ Change was therefore inevitable, especially in trying economic times.

Resistance to tithe gathered into a crescendo in the early 1830s, resulting in a widespread refusal by Catholics to pay a legal demand. Arrears of tithe payments mounted, those in the diocese of Ferns and Leighlin, for instance, in 1833 being £40,777 and £34,986 respectively.¹⁰ Although an act (3 and 4 Will. IV, c.100) provided relief for tithe owners who could demonstrate the scale of their arrears, the days of tithe exactions were numbered, and continued popular unrest precipitated further legislation (1 and 2 Vict., c.56) which converted tithe into a rent charge and reduced the amount payable, in effect abolishing the tax. The undermining of tithe as a source of income made the prospect of a clerical life in Ireland less attractive to graduating ordinands. The result was that many existing and aspirant clergy were led to entertain the prospect of emigration.

Political and ecclesiastical changes precipitated new configurations and identities within Irish Protestantism. One expression of this was the growth of Irish sympathies for high churchmanship and their development into an orientation towards Tractarianism and the Oxford movement, with J. H. Todd of TCD being a key figure. As Patricia McKee elucidates, although always a minority voice, high church devotional, liturgical, and church practices were incorporated over time into the Church of Ireland, and as such constitute an important development of this period. In the realm of historical reconstruction, Irish high churchmen advanced a convincing narrative to demonstrate the bona fides of the Church of Ireland as an authentic Irish institution. The result, as James BlakeKnox demonstrates, was that the respective writings of Richard Mant and Charles Richard Elrington, the Regius Professor of Divinity at TCD (1829–50), served as a defense in light of external criticism of the Church of Ireland, as a disavowal to the low church faction within the church, and as a counter to Presbyterian and Roman Catholic interpretations of the church’s past. The historical interpretation advanced by Mant and Elrington influenced the perceptions and understanding of generations of Irish clergymen, including John Travers Lewis, the first bishop of Ontario, who acknowledged the mentorship role Elrington had played in his own formation.

Adding to theological diversity, at the other extreme from high churchmanship there was unease among Anglicans over a growing number of secessionist laity and clergy.¹¹ These included Irish clergy such as Thomas Kelly, John Walker, and John Nelson Darby, all TCD graduates who drifted into non-conformity, as well as laity such as Lady Theodosia Powerscourt. Such seceders became Plymouth Brethren, and Kelly and Walker established their own denominational following. The most notable and influential was John Nelson Darby, who by the early 1830s was speaking at prophecy conferences near Dublin, out of which the embryonic Plymouth Brethren denomination was to emerge with Darby advancing its dispensationalist distinctives.¹² Darby in particular drew with him members from such prominent Church of Ireland families as Synge and Digby. Such secession was a source of turbulence and disunity in the church at a time when it was under assault from without on a number of sides. Nevertheless, the incidence of secession and the rise of high churchmanship indicate that there was significant theological diversity among Trinity College graduates, including clergy, in that they were not universally ultra-Protestant in their theological commitments. In Canada, while Benjamin Cronyn was firmly in the evangelical camp and John Travers Lewis was of a high church orientation, yet both were keen to promote church growth in a frontier setting.

The cumulative effect of attacks on the church was that they fed into a rising sense among Protestants as a whole of an apocalyptic end times. Apocalyptic fervor had been growing since the French Revolution. Significantly, the majority of early nineteenth-century writers on biblical prophecy were Anglicans; and a disproportionately large number of these, including futurists like John Nelson Darby, were educated at TCD. In this regard, it is notable that the college curriculum stressed, in the study of the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Micah, Zechariah, and Malachi, the omitting [of] such chapters as do not contain direct prophecies of the Messiah.¹³ Irish Anglicans were particularly apprehensive because of the prophecy of Signor Pastorini, the pseudonym for Charles Walmesley, a Catholic bishop, whose work General History of the Christian Church, first published in 1771 and reprinted many times, predicted the end of Protestantism and particularly the destruction by God in 1825 of the Church of Ireland. The prophecies were disseminated extensively and were particularly influential among rural agitators to whose cause the prophecies gave a sectarian purpose.¹⁴ The Trinity constituency was concerned about the dissemination of such predictions, evidenced in an anonymous pamphlet by one of its graduates, its title indicating that its concern was deemed of broader imperial import than merely domestically in Ireland.¹⁵ That the college was aware of events around the country is exemplified by the receipt by Rev. Charles Boyton of TCD, an Orangeman, in 1831, of reports of outrages against Protestants, one of which expressed the probability of expel[l]ing Protestants by an immediate and systematic rebellion.¹⁶ In addition, attacks on clergy, attacks on churches, bible burnings, and the expulsion of congregations are recorded for the period.¹⁷ Such outrages against Protestants and the expectancy around 1825 caused many to emigrate.¹⁸ Further, the coinciding of the year 1825 with the growing political aspirations of Irish Catholics and recurrent rural unrest only added to Protestant fears of a repetition of the massacres of 1641 and 1798. While nothing came of these specific predictions of annihilation, Protestants realized that something ominous was in the air and that their position was no longer secure. It comes as no surprise to note that an association for the relief of distressed Protestants was founded in 1836.¹⁹ Nor does it come as a surprise that the cumulative set of circumstances nurtured an anti-Catholic bias among Anglican emigrants, which they brought to the new world.

In the 1820s and 1830s, therefore, the prospects for the Church of Ireland and its adherents, including its existing and aspirant clergy, were not propitious. As described by one emigrant, conditions in Ireland by c.1830 had become irksome, unprofitable, and insecure, and as described by another, for Protestants Ireland was growing too hot.²⁰ An Irish peer addressing the House of Lords in 1827 referred to Protestants being persecuted and proscribed in Ireland and would be forced out of the country or annihilated.²¹ Political upheaval in the form of Catholic emancipation, the decimation of tithe as an income source, the sundering of a monopoly on education, the reduction in the number of bishoprics, a detrimental economic environment coupled with secessionism, and rising apocalyptic fervor informed the mental world of Irish Anglicans. Such circumstances coalesced to push large numbers from Ireland.

Pivotal in the formation of attitudes among the Irish Anglican élite was the education received at Trinity College, Dublin. It was the gathering point for Anglicans of different backgrounds, and as such acted as a great leveler and formative center where laity and aspirant clergy were educated together under a common curriculum. As Stunt outlines, the latter was unspecialized and provided the average student with a basic classical grounding. Yet, as Power demonstrates, those studying for the BA degree were obliged to take lectures in divinity, irrespective of whether they were intended for holy orders or not. This meant that graduates had a foundation in biblical knowledge and an oral articulation of the faith.

So far as divinity education specifically is concerned, prior to 1833 there existed no further professional education beyond the BA degree for those wishing to enter the church. Basic education at the undergraduate level was deemed sufficient, for the arts curriculum was formative for divinity studies. In it, study of the Bible was central, there was an emphasis on catechetical instruction, and an expectation of regular attendance at the college chapel. Reforms introduced in 1833 inaugurated a two-year graduate degree in divinity, thereby providing a concentration and raising the standard. The result was that clergy graduates who came to the new world possessed a classically-based education supplemented with a strong biblical literacy, a catechetical facility, and a grounding in apologetics.

In such an education particular texts were influential. One such was by William Magee, entitled Discourses on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice, based on two sermons delivered at Trinity College and later published as Discourses and Dissertations. As Radner demonstrates, such a text could be impactful on generations of students who were formed at TCD and subsequently went out to serve in the church, or appealed to the reading public. Its inclusion in the curriculum at Trinity for several decades assured its influence in the Irish church and beyond. Because the work was a defence of orthodoxy against Unitarians and Catholics in particular, not only was it useful in domestic contexts but in colonial situations as well.

Situating the prevailing piety of TCD as deriving in part from the eighteenth-century culture of reason and in part from the Romantic movement, Stunt depicts the faculty of the college as possessing a wide range of political and religious temperaments, though the prevailing one by the 1820s was evangelical. In fact TCD was at the center of Irish evangelical life, as evinced by the numbers of scholarly and evangelical clergy it produced. As Acheson documents, its graduates, lay and clerical, had a wide impact domestically and internationally, notably in the fields of law, literature, politics, and the church. In the evangelical advance, the relationship between Trinity College and the Bethesda Chapel was of strategic value, with the ministry of Benjamin Mathias proving attractive to students, and with John Walker and Thomas Kelly, the seceders, among its champions. Another key figure was Rev. Joseph H. Singer, who from his base in TCD influenced other facets of the evangelical cause in the church at large. Beyond Dublin, clerical graduates maintained a collectivist sense through clerical associations, that under Peter Roe in Ossory being the most notable.

In terms of wider influence, the most immediate context being the Church of England, until 1870 TCD provided more graduate clergy for the church in England than anywhere outside Oxford and Cambridge. As McCormack demonstrates, urban growth in England was the pull factor which occasioned a steady stream of TCD-trained clergy to the newly industrialized areas, including most prominently Lancashire, where in its parishes a prominent cohort of Trinity evangelicals was to be found. Between 1840 and 1880, over one hundred Dublin-educated clergymen were active in Liverpool and Birkenhead, while London brought together Irish Tractarians and several TCD evangelicals who operated in the crowded areas of London, where poor Irish Catholics had settled. Internationally, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) sponsored other TCD graduates for service in Australia and Canada, while others served the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Asia, Africa, and New Zealand.

Central in connecting local, national, and international levels, and also formative in the experience of Irish Anglicans in the early nineteenth century, was involvement in agencies and organizations intent on the dissemination of the Scriptures and scriptural education. Such agencies and organizations, drawing support from those of a low church or evangelical orientation, and through the dissemination of literature, acted to connect local communities and efforts with the wider missionary movement. For instance, Rev. Dominick Edward Blake Sr. (d.1821) (father of Dominick Edward Blake who emigrated to Canada in 1832) as rector of Kiltegan, Co. Wicklow, collected funds locally for the Hibernian CMS.²² Other clergy associated with the CMS prior to their coming to Canada included Rev. Charles Brough, who by 1826 was a committee member.²³ J. N. Darby was a supporter.²⁴ The most tangible connection between the CMS and Trinity College was in the person of Rev. Joseph H. Singer, who was one of a number who went on a preaching tour in 1827 to raise funds for the society.²⁵ Another older society, the Association of Discountenancing Vice (1792), had in its membership nearly all the fellows of TCD.²⁶ As Moffitt’s case study of the Sligo branch of the Hibernian Bible Society indicates, experience of being involved with educational, philanthropic, or scriptural organizations connected local communities with the wider world of missionary activity, and was formative in conveying the realization that local efforts were part of a larger, worldwide movement, with domestic and foreign efforts being complementary. Not only was this context formative in itself but was one in which an early missionary vocation could arise and was particularly relevant for emigrants who were already familiar with a wider world even before they left. All this bears witness to an intertwined, connected, and cohesive world domestically and internationally.

Lay participation in educational, philanthropic, and scriptural societies was critical to the success of such bodies.²⁷ The many para-church organizations succeeded because their membership was composed of committed ordinary people who subscribed to their goals and who engaged in multiple efforts in their support, including fundraising. Lay involvement and prominence in church affairs was a feature of the old world that was transferred to the new. Anything from the concern of immigrants in having churchmen in accord with their own theological views, to the critical lay vote which gave Benjamin Cronyn victory in the episcopal election in Huron in 1857, to the multiple involvements of Canada’s chief Anglican layman, Samuel Hume Blake, in advancing the interests of the church, exemplify the robust nature of lay involvement in the new world.

In common with the Irish as a whole, TCD graduate clergy exerted an influence on colonial life in the religious, cultural, intellectual, and political spheres, out of all proportion to their numbers. While Irish clergymen made up only about a quarter (23 percent) of the 235 Anglican clergymen who served in Australia prior 1850, and while by 1911 Protestants made up a quarter of the Irish-born population there, with their lay confreres they were among the country’s leading churchmen, educators, scholars, journalists, and in other sectors vital to public life and institutions. Also Irish Anglicans exhibited a high degree of involvement in public affairs as a natural extension of their worldview and drawing on their experience in Ireland. They were prominent in the legal profession, in politics, and in educational initiatives. As Hayes demonstrates, they were to the fore in their support of educational institutions such as the University of Toronto (an institution initially led by three of their own), social service, and evangelistic associations, including the Deaconess School.

In another contribution, Hayes rehabilitates the neglected and misunderstood ministry of deaconesses, and highlights the often devalued role they played in the church because of the lack of prestige associated with that ministry. In its genesis, a key individual linking old world and new was Rev. William Pennefather (1816–1873). Born in Dublin and a graduate of TCD (1840), Pennefather’s evangelical credentials derived from multiple connections in the Irish evangelical world. He was the nephew of Edward Pennefather (1774–1847), the Irish chief justice, whose wife was the sister of J. N. Darby.²⁸ Because of his connection with Darby, Pennefather introduced the latter’s ideas to a wider audience, including influencing D. L. Moody, whom he invited to England in 1873. Pennefather proceeded into the Anglican ministry with the various churches he served experiencing growth, and in the process becoming a noted preacher, ecumenist, and social reformer in London. He founded the Mildmay Institute (later renamed Mildmay Deaconess House), which included the training of women in that ministry. In Canada, with no bishop willing to assume responsibility for advancing the new ministry, the alumni association and supporters of Wycliffe College championed it with Samuel Blake, its main founder, taking the lead. Through contacts established for training purposes, Mildmay molded the training of deaconesses in the Canadian Church with a few hundred set apart in the eighty years after 1889. Representing them as collegially organized, mission-minded, professionally skilled women with a heart for the marginalized, Hayes traces how the deaconesses made a significant impact on church life and on wider Canadian society.

The deaconesses are a prime example of the transfer of an agency or service from the old to the new world. Another index of continuities and adaptation is naming practices. Many Irish place names were applied to the settlements where the Irish settled, marking a continuity of identity with the old world. Although the Irish were influential in its formation and ethos, the new theological college founded by Cronyn in 1863 was not named Ussher College after Archbishop James Ussher, the seventeenth-century divine associated with the theological ethos of the early decades of Trinity College, Dublin. But rather Cronyn named it Huron College, patterning the name of the new diocese on where it was situated. Frederick O’Meara and Samuel Blake were among the founders of the Protestant and Episcopal Divinity School in 1877, later Wycliffe College, the naming of which is probed by Otto. While the founders chose the fourteenth-century scholar John Wyclif as a highly representative figure of Evangelicalism, a close examination of the distinctive attributes of Evangelicalism indicates the extent to which each aligned with Wyclif’s theology and hence his appropriateness for naming purposes. The conclusion is that while Wyclif and nineteenth-century Anglican evangelicals lie in the same tradition, there are clear differences between them as well.

Faced with its dismantling in the old world, adherents of the Church of Ireland availed themselves of opportunities for its reconstruction in the new. If efforts to mount a so-called Second Reformation in Ireland in the 1820s were stunted, the new world provided an opportunity for its evangelical impulses to be unleashed. The zeal that proved impossible to give full reign to in the 1820s or was constrained because of political shifts and the dismantling of the ecclesiastical apparatus, was given a new, largely untrammeled, expression in a pioneering missionary setting in Australia and Canada.

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The Prophecies of Pastorini, Analyzed and Refuted. Dublin: George Bull,

1823

.

Refaussé, Raymond. Church of Ireland Records. Dublin: Four Courts,

2006

.

State of the Irish Clergy. DUM

10

(Dec

1837

)

727

–

36

.

Talman, James J., ed. Authentic Letters from Upper Canada Including an Account of Canadian Field Sports by Thomas William Magrath, the Whole Edited by the Rev. Thomas Radcliff. Toronto: Macmillan, 1953

.

Townsend, T. S. Facts and Circumstances Relating to the Condition of the Irish Clergy of the Established Church. Dublin: Curry,

1832

.

Trollope, Anthony. Clergymen of the Church of England. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press,

1974

.

Vaudry, Richard W. Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals and the Quebec Connection. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,

2003

.

Wilson, David A. The Irish in Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association,

1989

.

1. Barr and Carey, Religion and Greater Ireland.

2. Wilson, Irish in Canada,

8

; Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World,

48

.

3. Trollope, Clergymen of the Church of England,

111

, where it is noted that livings in Ireland were more generally in the gift of the bishops compared to England and were given on the basis of merit.

4. Haig, Victorian Clergy,

32

,

119

,

123

,

194

–

95

.

5. Gladwin, Mindful of Her St. Columbas,

301

. The Irish famine appears to be a major factor: twenty-four clergymen (half of all Irish clergymen) arrived in Australia.

6. Talman, Authentic Letters from Upper Canada,

119

–

20

.

7. Two-thirds of clerical incomes derived from rectorial tithes: Refaussé, Church of Ireland Records,

32

.

8. For the eighteenth-century background on tithes, see Power, Land, Politics, and Society,

196

–

210

.

9. Townsend, Facts and Circumstances,

87

–

89

; State of the Irish Clergy,

734

–

35

.

10. Thomas [Elrington], Ferns to the primate,

26

Apr.

1833

(RCBL Ms

183

/

1

/

22

).

11. Carter, Anglican Evangelicals, appendix (

399

–

403

) lists about

170

seceders in the period c.

1730

–

1900

.

12. Akenson, Discovering the End of Time.

13. Dublin University Calendar (

1838

),

3

.

14. Donnelly, Captain Rock,

119

–

49

traces the overt sectarian element.

15. The Prophecies of Pastorini, analyzed and refuted, and the powerful tendency of inflammatory predictions to excite insurrection, satisfactorily demonstrated, from incontrovertible historical records, with a cursory view of the dangerous state of Ireland, from an exclusively Popish conspiracy. Humbly submitted to the consideration of the Protestants of the British Empire. By a Graduate of Trinity College

(1823).

16. Robert Crawford, Castlecomer to Rev. Charles Boyton, TCD,

5

Jan.

1831

(NLI Ms

18

,

609

[

2

]).

17. State of the Irish Clergy,

727

–

32

. It tabulates fifty outrages against clergy in the period

1834

–

37

: ibid.,

730

. For a similar situation of outrages against Protestants in the

1680

s: Power, Lapsed Member and Penitent Convert,

111

–

13

.

18. Phelan and O’Sullivan, A Digest of the Evidence, i,

36

–

37

,

39

,

42

.

19. RCBL Ms

485

Association for the Relief of Distressed Protestants. It contains minutes, accounts, inventories, and reports dating from

1836

in twenty-two volumes.

20. Talman, Authentic Letters, xxii,

99

.

21. Quoted in Akenson, Discovering the End of Time,

243

.

22. Rev. D. E. Blake, Kiltegan Glebe, Baltinglass to the Society,

26

Mar.

1819

: RCBL Ms

315

/

1

Abstract letter book,

1814

–

23

.

23. RCBL Ms 315

/

3

/

1

Abstract letter book,

1814

–

23

;

315

/

1

/

1

/

2

,

3

,

76

,

84

; minutes,

1826

–

37

.

24. RCBL Ms

315

/

1

/

1

/

2

/

10

Minutes

1826

–

37

, where his subscription of £

1

.

1

s.

0

d. is recorded.

25. RCBL Ms 315

/

1

/

1

/

1–3

Minutes

1814

–

58

sub

1827

.

26. Liechty, Irish Evangelicalism, Trinity College Dublin,

97

.

27. Ibid.,

67

–

69

.

28. DEB, vol.

2

,

871

. William Pennefather was seemingly a first cousin of R. T. Pennefather (

1830

–

1865

) who served as secretary of Sir Edmund Walker Head, governor general of Upper Canada, from

1854

(Leighton, Pennefather, Richard Theodore, n.p.).

2

Trinity College, Dublin, and the Making of Irish Evangelicalism, 1790–1850

Alan R. Acheson

The Irish Establishment became by far the most evangelical section of the Anglican church.²⁹ Lecky’s observation can be extended to note that, largely out of the strength of that defining tradition of the nineteenth-century Irish Church, a preponderant influence in Anglicanism worldwide was achieved. The curious neglect of the tradition itself, its importance in Ireland, and its impact overseas is a unique failure in both Anglican Church history and Irish history. The Church of England has long been able to read its evangelical history, and continues to publish its biography. The church in Wales is also well briefed about its evangelical heritage. But that of the Church of Ireland is virtually unknown, in virtual defiance of Primate William Alexander’s call to his General Synod in 1905, as he embarked on a masterly and moving analysis of that heritage. But let us note this: the evangelical revival in Ireland was wonderful and it was almost everywhere.³⁰ The studied neglect of the past century is impoverishing, and not only for Ireland. For through its unique outreach the revival in the Church of Ireland strengthened the growing Anglican churches in the old Commonwealth—Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—enhanced the expanding work of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Africa and India, and provided the Church of England with hundreds of clergy. At home it touched the Presbyterian Church and brought the Bible to the Irish people. A movement seen as distinct from Methodism in 1784, and as the dominant school in the church of 1878, was at once Irish and evangelical. Rooted in the doctrinal principles of the Reformation, it also drew inspiration from the history of Ireland’s national church. If its worldwide outreach recalled the heroic mission of the sixth century, its scholarly and saintly character was equally redolent of the early Celtic church. If that heritage, then, has been strangely ignored, so in particular has been the place of Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), as the beating heart of Irish evangelical life and outreach.

From 1756, when A. M. Toplady (author of the hymn Rock of Ages) entered TCD as a student recently converted in a barn in county Wexford under the preaching of a semiliterate Methodist, evangelicals had been represented in the college. From the 1790s until after disestablishment in 1871, there were always evangelical clergy who had been scholars, tutors, and fellows of TCD; and from the 1840s, evangelical bishops who had been divinity professors or assistant lecturers. Whereas the evangelical revival in England was showing signs of decadence by 1830, in Ireland, by contrast, its vigor, both intellectual and spiritual, was at its height during the half century from 1825. In that year, Edward Hincks, the famed Egyptologist, became rector of Killyleagh in county Down. He epitomized the new genre of Irish clergyman, at once scholarly and evangelical. Most were educated at Trinity College. Its intellectual eminence, conservative theology, and biblical divinity training—the hallmarks of TCD in the nineteenth century—both served and were served by evangelicals. Two learned bishops of Ossory did much to establish and consolidate the evangelical tradition of the Irish Church. Hugh Hamilton (1799–1805), a founder of the Royal Irish Academy, was its first episcopal patron. Of his five sons identified with the tradition, George Hamilton too was an erudite scholar, his publications including Codex Criticus of the Hebrew Bible (1821). A bust of Bishop James Thomas O’Brien adorns the Long Room in Trinity College, which he had served with distinction before his appointment to the see of Ossory (1842–1874). His learning informed his episcopal charges, his trenchant analyses of Tractarian principles being especially valued in England and the United States as well as Ireland. With Robert Daly’s appointment to the see of Cashel in 1843, two evangelicals had become bishops within two years. As rector of Powerscourt from 1814, Daly’s influence among the aristocracy and gentry of county Wicklow was such that Glendalough diocese became a stronghold of the evangelical revival. As Bishop of Cashel (1843–1872), Daly identified with and encouraged the church’s home mission in Dingle and other areas of southwest Munster.

Evangelicals educated in TCD were prominent in the legal profession also. From their ranks came a Lord Chancellor of England, Hugh McCalmont, Earl Cairns, and of Ireland, Sir Joseph Napier; and two chief justices of Ireland—Edward Pennefather and Thomas Lefroy. From 1867, Cairns was Chancellor, and Napier Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University, until 1885 and 1882, respectively; and the provostship of the liberal evangelical Dr. George Salmon lasted until 1902.

Literary Associations

The evangelical revival, as the late Vivian Mercier established, was the background of the literary families of Brontë, Synge, and Yeats, and touched George Bernard Shaw in his boyhood in Dublin. It was linked with the Romantic movement. The author of the tragedy Bertram, first performed at Drury Lane in 1816, was C. R. Maturin, curate of St. Peter’s, Dublin, who had much influence on French Romanticism. Like another evangelical curate, Charles Wolfe in the diocese of Armagh, best known for his